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New Perspectives in Interactional Linguistic Research
Edited by Margret Selting and Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 36] 2024
► pp. 132–160

Introducing the “Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction” (PECII)

A novel resource for exploring cross-situational and cross-linguistic variability in social interaction

ORCID logo | Leibniz-Institute for the German LanguageMannheim
| Leibniz-Institute for the German LanguageMannheim
| Leibniz-Institute for the German LanguageMannheim
| University of Basel
| Leibniz-Institute for the German LanguageMannheim
| University of California Los Angeles
| University of Helsinki
| Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz
| Leibniz-Institute for the German LanguageMannheim
This article introduces the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (PECII), a multi-language video-corpus of social interactions in a range of informal settings and activity-contexts. After describing the basic motivation for its compilation, the design principles that underlie its composition and the data it contains, we illustrate PECII’s usefulness for comparative Interactional Linguistic (IL) and Conversation Analytic (CA) research. We do this by offering an analytic sketch of the practices people use to initiate turns that interfere with and seek to rectify another’s (problematic) behavior, focusing on their variability across languages and settings/activity-contexts. By maximizing the comparability of interactional data, PECII not only promotes the enhancement of cross-linguistic research in IL, it also opens up new avenues for exploring “cross-situational” variability (so-called “situation design”).
Keywords: Interactional Linguistics, corpus, informal interaction, European languages, cross-linguistic, comparison, activity, situation design, intervention, turn-initial elements
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (PECII): Conceptual origins, design principles, and composition
  • 3.Using PECII: An exemplifying analytic sketch
    • 3.1Sketching the analytic domain and locating a target phenomenon: Interventions and intervention-initiation techniques
    • 3.2Cross-situational comparison in a given language
    • 3.3Cross-linguistic comparison
  • 4.Summary
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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